It had started storming not so long after Alastor arrived back on his world. Once, there had been such a thing as a gentle shower on Alastor. Not anymore.

The storm didn’t start with thunder, but within the hour it had started. He hadn’t moved from where he was laying. At some point he’d rolled onto his back and just looked up at the sky. His eyes were burning and his throat was raw, and all that effort to be healthy and hydrated was completely wasted.

The emotions had worked their way through his body, but in the process he’d exhausted what energy he did have. He went from feeling everything to feeling nothing.

It wasn’t safe to be outside, not when the weather was like this. If the storm took out the lights, he lost his only real defense against the shadows.

A part of him didn’t care. He was so tired. Not just physically, but the weight of everything still felt crushing. He had memories buried under memories buried under memories, and uncovering one sent the whole stack toppling.

He could have laid there. He could have let the darkness roll in, could have let them swallow him up. Could have let it just end.

Except, of all things, Michael’s voice kept replaying in his head.

I have promises to keep.

And he did, didn’t he? He’d promised himself he’d do everything in his power to keep this world safe, and here it was, suffering.

He’d promised Percy he’d take care of himself. Lying in the rain and waiting for the end of all things probably didn’t fit under that umbrella.

He’d promised Michael he’d be back soon. They’d made a deal, he couldn’t go back on that.

He had to get up.

The rain had soaked through him completely; at one point in time he’d alternated between being overheated to frozen and back again, but now he just felt nothing. It wasn’t a comfortable emptiness; the numbness was a pain in itself. But, it was better than the raging emotions he’d had earlier.

He’d moved from fresh pain to soreness. His body and mind both were one giant, perpetual ache.

The rain came down harder, and the wind whipped through the area violently. If he focused, he could see the faint glow of fire from the watchtowers on the wall. Even in this weather, the beacons burned on; they’d been through this before. Through a lot of this before. They were well defended, and had been since they were installed. The need to check on them was purely out of habit.

It was just something to do, but it had grown into a ritual.

Devyn hadn’t lived this long without some measure of safety.

He shouldn’t stay out here forever. He’d get sick, or the shadows would work their way in. He should take a walk around the perimeter, check that everything was still fortified, and then go inside.

He didn’t want to. He still felt empty inside.

But, if he had a task, he’d complete it.

When he pushed himself up, it still felt like the ground was moving beneath him. He was exhausted, but the numbness eased the discomfort somewhat. It wasn’t a blessing, it was just there.

It took him longer than usual to make it across the yard, to ascend the steps. The wind buffeted him and the water spilled down the steps in a small waterfall. It was a nasty storm, but it wasn’t like Jupiter. Lightning in the distance wasn’t particularly comforting; he hated storms.

But, it was a light, and if he watched for long enough it always looked like it sent the shadows scattering.

At the top of the wall, he could see a great stretch of land; he could see the withered forests, dark and expansive. He could see the flooded river. The roads were gone, only memories in his mind. Grass had overtaken them. He saw no fires in the distance, no signs of life anywhere else.

He hadn’t seen those in years.

Long years. He’d stopped keeping time so he really didn’t know.

At this height, he should have been able to see everything, but he couldn’t see where the sky met the ground; the clouds were too dark and it must have been nighttime by now. He walked carefully along the wall; it was only a few feet wide and any good gust might have sent him over the edge.

He made his rounds slowly, diligently checking each beacon. The watchtowers were small and didn’t offer much defense; their primary purpose was to protect the fire inside more than anyone in it so it wouldn’t have done him any favors to block the light off. Thick glass had been strategically placed around the flames to protect them, and the light from the fire stretched halfway to the next post. There wasn’t a break in the lighting, and the fires were strong enough that they’d burn for a few more days at least. He was going to be here for a while, he had plenty of time to make sure they’d last.

It took him an hour to check the fires, but that time meant nothing to him. It slipped away, unnoticed. He knew he moved slower than usual, but given the storm it was wise to take caution.

He was exhausted from earlier but denied himself the opportunity to sit down. He was soaked through, so the cold of the stone and water wasn’t a deterrent. He just didn’t know how long it would take him to get up again.

The thunder started when he had nearly finished, and the lightning had grown more violent. Sometimes it would just flash across the sky, but sometimes it would strike a tree in the distance. In the time it took him to make it across the entire wall, two trees had gone up in flames. One had burned out already, but the second was still going.

The light was welcome.

He looked at the oak tree a few times during this walk, and each time he was gripped with grief. Percy had no tombstone, no grave marker. Just the tree.

To be fair, it was better than any slab of stone could have been, even if it didn’t have the gold luster it had started with, and even if it hadn’t sprouted leaves in–

A long time.

The tree didn’t look healthy but it didn’t look dead. He didn’t know how he knew, but he felt it, the same way he felt the steady link to his world.

The lightning never hit that tree, so maybe it was a small mercy. But, it was from Jupiter.

It probably would have been fine. He felt very protective of it, though.

Even though he couldn’t bring himself to go anywhere near it right now.

Devyn had stayed powered up the entire time he was out; it was dangerous to power down while he was here. Distantly, he missed the warmth and comfort of his borrowed clothes.

Lightning struck the far end of the wall and he could have sworn he felt a jolt of electricity up his arm from where his hand was resting against it. It didn’t hurt; his hand tingled. He withdrew it from the wall and clenched and unclenched it but couldn’t shake the feeling that something was still there.

It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t unwelcome.

It was something different, in this lonely world.

He descended the steps with more caution than he had climbing up.

Thoughts were sluggish in his mind, but they were there. He wasn’t trying to bury them again. It felt didn’t feel so much like trying to navigate through rushing water, where each thought hit him like debris in a flood. Now, it was still. Now, it felt like trying to wade through the mud.

He felt like he was hip deep in it, wading slowly and waiting to find a pit to just sink into and swallow him up. He walked cautiously, down the steps and in his mind. There was a careful balance to all things, and he’d already tipped the ship earlier–flipped it upside down, scattered everything. He’d recovered the pieces but things didn’t still feel right.

He knew, now. He didn’t completely understand, but that would come. He didn’t want to accept it, but he knew that was down the road, too.

He’d already caught himself with fleeting thoughts, like maybe this was just a bad dream.

Devyn knew the truth. He just didn’t like it.

His hand still felt heavy when his feet were on the grass; lightning struck nearby and the thunder roared so loudly that he felt it in his teeth.

He wasn’t in any hurry to go inside. If the lightning struck him, so be it.

He’d never been scared of it before, and he wasn’t now.

Calmness had swept over him; it didn’t exist because he was calm. It manifested only in the absence of all other emotions. He didn’t have the energy to be anything else right now.

The ground was saturated with water and he sank a little into every step. The grass was just spongy enough to keep him from sinking more than an inch or so, and it was so brittle that he wasn’t worried about slipping. He walked to the towards the great black doors.

In its prime, the Hall of the Ancients had been an impressive structure that served many purposes--political, personal, and private. It had existed as long as the Senshi had, and had been built as an operations base so long ago that the original design was lost.

Its first incarnation had been little more than a private underground chamber, a meeting room, and a storage room; now, it had expanded to be so much more.

Now, it was worthy of its name.

The largest room in the Hall was the lobby, easily three times the size of the original building, which had long ago been sealed off and protected and accessible only to the Senshi and those he deemed worthy.

He’d been the only one there for–

Well, centuries, probably. He didn’t visit it as often as he should.

Within the building, there were fifteen different halls, and no less than five rooms down each of them. Some were residential rooms, to accommodate guests or workers, some were offices, some were planning rooms, or storage.

Those had been empty for so long that Devyn didn’t remember what most of them looked like.

He had an entire hall to himself, and he’d barely spent any time there. He had private rooms to train, to sleep, to hide away from the world. They were safe, reinforced and maintained.

He had to walk down a long hallway to get from the yard to the lobby.

The Hall had always been dark, and he’d thought it was haunted since the first time he arrived as a child.

It was, just in a different way than he’d thought.

The shadows had always seemed to watch him. They clung to the dark corners and crept from nooks and crannies.

If he’d known that he housed the Chaos that had taken over his world, he would have burned the whole place down before they’d been able to grow and spread.

He’d have done a lot of things differently if he’d known then what he knew now.

But, the Chaos was gone, for now. He’d chased it out once, but he lived knowing it could come back at any point in time. If it did, he lost his last defense against it. He lost his fortress.

He lost his home.

He lost the Core.

Torches lit the hallways from here to the lobby; one was dim but the rest burned brightly enough to make up for it. His footsteps echoed down the long hallway. Sometimes, he could trick himself. Sometimes he heard them loudly enough that he thought he wasn’t alone.

He’d kept the Hall open, hoping for stragglers. He’d have taken anyone in, but no one had come.

Devyn had closed up much of the Hall when it just become too much to take care of alone. He didn’t have time to patrol outside and inside.

He kept fires burning by all the doors, but it would have been a waste of limited resources to keep making more candles, more torches. There were trees nearby that he could collect sap from, but since his world had gotten sick it had only gotten harder.

He didn’t anticipate a reprieve any time soon.

Especially because Percy was gone.

There wasn’t going to be an easy solution to all of his problems. He had been so sure that he’d find Percy and they’d work out answers. Percy was creative, an inventor. He would have already found some way to keep everything better illuminated.

…Maybe like on Earth.

He’d have to ask Michael when he got back.

Pushing the door to the lobby open took more effort than Devyn wanted to admit, even to himself; he left a trail of water puddling after him as he walked, but he wasn’t planning on going back outside any time soon.

It wasn’t like someone else was going to come in and slip on it.

Once, the lobby had been lively. It was dusty now, in all the places he couldn’t reach. It was still a powerful room, and the architecture had withstood the test of time–for the most part. The windows rattled some in the wind, and there were a few puddles collecting around the room.

Devyn didn’t have patience or energy to take care of it right now. He wasn’t going to go up to the roof in this weather.

The architecture in the lobby was both strong and delicate, tall stone walls climbed into the sky, and a vaulted ceiling had been meticulously structured to replicate the planet’s symbol in gold. Bright, once. Faded, now.

The windows were nearly all stained glass in the same hues of blues and teals and greens, and while the stone was clear and white on the inside, the outside of the building was a deep, menacing black. There were five floors in the lobby, though only the second floor had stairs. The other levels had always been strange to Devyn; when he was younger, he’d thought they were cosmetic and untouchable. Sometimes, he could have sworn that he’d seen someone looking down from the shadows.

Something like ghosts, he’d thought.

Back then he hadn’t thought shadows could be menacing. Unnerving, sure, but not alive. Not like he knew now.

In all his time here, of course he’d explored.

When he was alone, there was no one to tell him not to climb up to the third floor, or the fourth, or fifth.

There were rooms, locked or enchanted. Some he’d gotten in, some he hadn’t.

If there had ever been stairs there, they’d been removed before he was born.

There were three floors with no purpose, only empty rooms and secrets.

The Hall was a frightening building, to be honest. He was comfortable here, mostly. Sometimes it still unnerved him.

The gothic architecture was only somewhat softened by the colorful tiles and carefully constructed artwork that hung on the lower floor. Everything was color coordinated, even now. They were a tasteful planet who admired strength and combat--a good mix of elegance and brutality.

Devyn remembered when it was bright and beautiful.

It was enchanting still, in its own way.

Even if it was now painfully obvious that it was such a relic. He’d gotten used to the wear and tear on the building; over time, it hadn’t seemed so dramatic.

Now, he could see how different it was from then and now.

He was trying to live in the past and ignored the changing world around him.

There had been no one to tell him not to. No one to remind him.

He liked it better that way.

On its own, the architecture was a bit overwhelming, deliberately so. The high ceilings and narrow hallways gave an immediate sensation of being very small, and the sharp angles and deep shadows high above certainly gave the impression that danger could be hiding up above, watching.

Only a few locations within the Hall didn’t feel so threatening. Devyn’s personal quarters and the oldest rooms, of course, but those hadn’t been accessible to anyone but himself and his chosen.

The lobby was the greatest exception, if only because someone had gone through great lengths to make it more accomodating. Once, it had chairs, and bright rugs, and paintings along the walls. It had statues, and fountains, and plants.

The reception desk was empty and had been for a very long time. Devyn stared for a long moment, anyway. He remembered a few of his receptionists. He couldn’t remember most of their names, and most of their faces were too blurred to make out any details.

He remembered Lukas, but only because the brightest memories were the ones tethered to memories of Percy.

Lightning flashed above and thunder echoed so loudly it made the glass rattle.

Devyn didn’t want to be in here for any longer; he closed the door behind him, bolted it shut, and did a quick sweep of the room.

Perfectly empty.

The long hallways and hidden rooms made it easy to feel alone elsewhere in the building, even when the building was full of people. The lobby used to be busy. There used to be guards stationed at the entrances.

There weren’t even shadows, anymore.

His hallway was locked. Not that it could keep out the shadows if they ever made it in, but it was a comfort, anyway. The key was in subspace, and he had to fish around for a few minutes to find it.

Usually, his magical little pocket of things was full of oddities, so it wasn’t uncommon that he had to sift through things to find what he was looking for. He wasn’t focused enough anymore to just easily summon things to him. He was distinctly aware of all of the food Michael had packed for him.

It was a comfort, even if he didn’t have any sort of appetite right now.

Oh, the key.

Tucked safely in a metal tin with a slew of other important things. Practically important things, not his collection of oddities or things of sentimental value.

He had a few of those tins that he kept with him, and more in his room.

His room, that felt so far away right now.

He knew the path there by heart; as soon as he unlocked the doors, he’d locked them again behind him and started off.

The torches still burned, he’d have a few days before the wax ran out.

He didn’t know if he’d have the energy to do much between now and then, but he’d try to rest.

Sleeping was impractical here, and not just for the storm. He didn’t like the dark, he didn’t like the shadows.

He felt smothered by the Chaos. On Earth, it had been easy to pinpoint–small and infrequent. Here, it was everywhere. Waves of it, rolling on the outskirts of what he could sense.

Like it was waiting for him to let his guard down.

To slip up.

Honestly, it had missed its chance earlier.

He hadn’t been so undone in centuries. He didn’t know if it would happen again.

It shouldn’t happen again. He shouldn’t forget again. No matter how much relief it brought him to hide away in the comfort of his memories and dream of a future where things would be okay again.

It was different now.

He knew there were people on Earth, at least. With their own problems, but with their own resources. They’d offered to help him. Had helped him, already.

It was a comfort to know that he wasn’t alone.

Here, sure.

But life was thriving there. Chaos hadn’t swallowed them up. Yet.

He had his own problems to deal with, but he didn’t think any of them deserved that. He wasn’t ready to give up on his own world, but he’d have been lying if he said it wasn’t a little daunting to think that he had to find some way to fix it.

He’d forgotten what it was like to exist anywhere that didn’t have waves of Chaos drowning you.

In his memories, there was a world devoid of it. But then, in his memories, Percy was still alive.

He’d always loved his world; he’d put it above himself for most of his life. There had only ever been one thing he valued more than that, but Percy had never come between him and his duties. He’d helped him find ways to make it flourish. Helped him build a better reputation, helped him make connections and improve the quality of life.

Devyn had done his best in Percy’s absence, but it wasn’t the same.

The walk to his room felt unending. His thoughts faded from the present to the past, from here to Jupiter, to Earth. He wasn’t sure what sort of future he was supposed to make out of this.

He didn’t know how things were going to be okay.

There was no plan, only a promise–

He would go back to Earth. Soon.

He didn't know what he’d do there, but he’d promised Michael.

There were things he needed to do here, first.

His room was stagnant. The bed was made, not because that’s how he liked it but because it meant he knew there wasn’t anything hiding in the covers. His room was too organized for his taste, but that was because he’d had a long time to put everything in a place.

He’d had hobbies once, but that was a lifetime ago.

Lifetimes ago.

Things were perfectly in place, as if he could have picked them up at any point in time. The room was dusty, a relic in itself. Dim. Very dim. The torch would go out some time tonight if he wasn’t careful.

He had others here, waiting.

Devyn’s room was eclectic, practically unchanged since he’d last shared his bed. He didn’t sleep there anymore, it felt wrong. Too big and too empty. He slept on the couch on the wall across from the door. It wasn’t quite large enough for him to fit completely and it wasn’t particularly comfortable anymore but sleep was a necessity, not a luxury. He didn’t want to get too comfortable and let his guard down. Here, he was safest.

He powered down for a split second and it was warm. He wanted to stay like that and wrap a blanket around himself just to thaw a bit, but that wasn’t safe. He powered up again almost immediately, dry.

Still cold.

He was tired, but he had too much to do before he could rest.

Miles to go, still.

He started but emptying out his little pocket universe, stuffed full of things. His desk had a clear space on one half, so he started by unpacking most of the food he’d been sent here with. He kept some stored away, just in case. He pulled out his Senshi phone, still wrapped in a silk scarf.

Michael’s jacket.

He went to put it on the back of the chair but paused, decided against it, and put it on.

It felt like it was still warm, but he knew that was impractical. He must have just been colder than he realized. His teeth hadn’t started chattering, but maybe he was just too tired.

He kept the flashlights on the desk, and pulled out a few of the oddities he’d collected on Earth, dropping them off in an empty tray on the corner of his desk. He had a few outfits, freshly cleaned and repaired, so that was nice. A few pieces of jewelry that he’d had to take off and store for safekeeping.

A locket.

His fingers brushed against it; the bail had broken and he hadn’t had time to repair it.

He’d memorized the face inside, but he couldn’t resist the urge to open it. Inside, a portrait of Percy–young. So young.

He wanted to run his thumb over it, but it occurred to him that this paint was old and he was suddenly afraid of damaging it. It was faded, but in relatively good condition. He slid it into the pocket of his borrowed jacket; he’d take time to repair it later.

That was important. He’d be stuck inside until the storm calmed somewhat.

He had a few more supplies, a few more trinkets, a few more outfits. A few tools, a few candles.

His subspace was regularly at least half full, but even as it was it felt empty now.

Maybe he just needed to reorganize things and reassess what he needed to bring with him. While he was on here or Earth.

The next few minutes were spent preparing a new torch; once it was lit, he swapped it out with the old one and moved that to an empty sconce on the wall, near the entrance to the bathroom.

His room was brighter, but not as much as it used to be. Limited resources meant he had to be careful with what he used. He had the flashlight Michael had give him but he didn’t want to use it now unless he absolutely had to. He still had a few hundred torches, but he wasn’t making them as quickly as he was using them, so he didn’t have much longer unless he figured something out.

Percy was going to help him.

Now, though…

The storm was rattling the Hall, even this deep into it. He didn’t hear himself sigh over the noise it was making outside.

He’d have to figure something else out. He couldn't let his world be swallowed by darkness.

He picked up a blanket that had been neatly folded on the couch and shook it out before he draped it over his shoulders like a cape. It didn’t take long for him to curl up on the couch underneath it. From here, he had a perfect view of the portrait of himself and Percy. He had to bring his eyes to it, had to see Percy’s face, and–

And, it hurt. He looked so perfect smiling like that. Devyn had always liked the way the light looked like it was dancing in his eyes. He had portraits of Percy, paintings by Percy.

He looked happy in the painting, too. Soft. Not fierce, or angry, or threatening, like in most of the portraits he’d been subjected to.

This was an empty home, full of old things and old memories, and him.

His eyes were burning again; he couldn't blame the rain this time.

Maybe the dust.